Are you possessive? learn the difference between love and possession
By Sherrie Campbell — Written on Sep 19, 2011
This is the 4th article in a series of five discussing natural emotions and their unnatural counterparts. Any time our natural emotions are repressed they create unnatural reactions and responses. The natural emotions are repressed in the majority of people. Our emotions are our gifts, our friends and allies. They are our soul representatives. They represent the world of each person’s private inner life. Because emotions are universal we best relate to each other on the level of the emotions. The best way to have productive communication is to come from our natural emotions. We do not need to become better communicators. We need to be in touch with our natural responses and relate to the other from how we feel. The natural emotions are never violent, threatening, crazy-making or controlling.
Violence, circular fighting, stonewalling, and not listening is what most people call communication. Our first emotions represent our truth. Our secondary emotions represent our defenses. Our first emotions show up in open discussions, our secondary emotions end up in non-productive fighting. Our first emotions allow each partner to be smart and understood. They allow our discussions to grow and for each person to learn more about the other. Our secondary emotions create a right and wrong platform where no one is heard and each person looks crazy. Understanding is halted with the use of the secondary emotions.
This article is going to discuss love and its fixed counterpart, possessiveness. Love is our most consistent and present natural emotion. Love is the first emotion we experience. Love is also our most powerful emotion. When love is allowed to be expressed we feel free within. Love is the natural expression of who we really are, and is the one emotion that brings us all together. When a natural disaster occurs it is love that unites the world. No other emotion has this power. Love unites and branches off into other emotions such as compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, understanding, softness and mutuality.
The emotions are the first way in which preverbal babies communicate. They are dependent upon the emotions of the caregiver to provide them an experience. It is called felt-thought. Babies coo and smile and the caregiver coos and smiles back. This is called mirroring. When we receive mirroring we bond through this emotional sharing. We know we exist. If babies are hungry and they cry, the caregiver will respond to the emotion of hunger, connect, and feed the baby. This is how trust and mutuality are established and love grows. Love grows and trust and mutuality grow. Love is the first and most natural form of communication that allows us to bond with others.
If, as children, we had our emotions mirrored, were made to feel our love was special, we know we exist in the world of love and relationship. If it was ok to express it, receive it without limitation and condition, humiliation, and rejection, love would be experienced as normal, free and unlimited as an emotional state. Love is an emotion that is best experienced when there is giving and receiving. Love is meant to grow when this interaction occurs. Love requires mirroring. If you give to someone there is the joy of seeing the other’s happiness upon receiving, and it feels exhilarating to receive in return. Love can be felt by receiving and through giving. Love’s natural desire is increase. Just like a baby cooing and the mother cooing back, when we give and receive, love can increase. The more love is mirrored the more love will grow. There is no score keeping, no judgment, just mirroring, playfulness and joy. If love is left to be free, love is the most simplistic emotion, the most capable, the most healing, the most bonding, and the easiest, so why then is love so hard?
Most of us have not been raised to be free with our love, and nor did we have consistent or positive mirroring of the emotion growing up. Most of us experienced love to be tied into performance. We were given love based on agreement, negotiations, and a bartering system. We learned there was not enough love that it could run out, so we had better be “good” in order to receive our portion. We had to be sure not to need “too much” so as to not run our quota past its limit. Most of us have been humiliated in our love and our desires for it, we have been told we are needy, that we give too much, take too much, require too much, that we are annoying, or we are not enough. Sometimes we are ignored in our efforts to give and receive love and this tells us we do not exist. There is not a more lonely feeling than to feel like we do not exist. When we are lonely, we are without love. People commit suicide out of loneliness.
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